About Valve, Steam and Linux: Linux on a Steam Console?

Sep 10, 2012

A few minutes ago, I’ve been reading an article about Valve releasing the new Big Picture Mode for Steam (beta).

As you probably know, Valve’s porting Steam and the Source engine to Linux and there have been many assumptions about why Valve is doing this.
Is it because of Windows 8 and its marketplace? Or is it just about expanding to other platforms?

Now there have been many rumors about Valve working on a Steam console.

“But how are those related to each other?” you may think.

In my opinion, there’s a pretty good chance that Valve will use Linux on their console, because:

They won’t need to develop everything from scratch.

They won’t need to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses (there have been some rumors about that Valve could also use Windows on their console, because of the amount of games that run on it).

They could get the Linux community on their side (well that depends on how open the Steam console would be, but getting more games on Linux itself is also a nice thing).

I also think that this could get more developers for Linux games, because it won’t be just about “developing Linux games”, but also about “developing games for Valve’s console”.

I highly appreciate discussion about this topic. If I’m wrong at some point, please tell me.